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Samba domain controller: Join a domain with Windows Seven

Windows 7 is comming. And for sure you'd like to connect it to you Samba domain controller. But How ?

Well the devs at Samba have their idea. You actually need two things:

Modifiy the Windows Seven registry

Have at least Samba 3.3.7 or Samba 3.4.0

For the registry mod, just navigate to the following key:

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanWorkstation\Parameters

and add the following entries:

DWORD DomainCompatibilityMode = 1
DWORD DNSNameResolutionRequired = 0

For those who can't be bothered, the registry mod file is attached at the end of this article.

About the samba version, it'll be a bit hard to get a distribution that includes one of those versions. While writing this article, only four distribs (CDLinux, Chakra, NuTyX, Vine Linux) included v3.3.7 and only a couple of bleeding edge (Sidux 2009-02, PLD Linux 3.0) and beta distribs (Ubuntu 9.10 beta, Fedora rawhide 12) included v3.4.0.

If you want to keep your distrib, you'll need to uninstall your current samba release and compile Samba sources or find a nice repo with non official packages. This will eventually break your 'official' distribution support. You may also get some dependencies errors or simply other errors.

The best thing to do is installing a fresh linux, without samba, and then compile it from sources (see below).

[Update from 17-10-2009]

Redhat RHEL and CentOS have a package named samba3x which holds version 3.3.5 of the Samba server. This package is avaiable as 'Technology Preview'. You might check for this to get updated to v3.3.7.